If your life has been hard - genuinely, relentlessly, inexplicably hard - I am not telling you that you chose this as some kind of cosmic punishment or that you should stop trying to make things better. I'm telling you that it might be by design, not your failing.

Every life is its own set of circumstances designed for whatever that soul came here to experience or master or work through. An old soul in a messy life isn't a contradiction. It might be exactly what they signed up for. The mess doesn't tell you anything about the soul inside it.